Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) Barcelona

Soil and Rock Mechanics Research Group

People

Prof. Eduardo Alonso

Professor of Civil Engineering

Doctor in Civil Engineering from the Polytechnic University of Madrid in 1969 and Philosophy Doctor from Northwestern University in 1973.

He has worked in Rodio Spain (1969-71), has been a research student at Northwestern University in Evanston-Illinois (1971-73), research associate at McGill University in Montreal (1973-74), Full Professor (1974-86) ) at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia and since 1986 Professor at that University.

He has published more than four hundred articles in international journals and national and international symposiums in which he has been guest speaker on multiple occasions.

The research topics include the probability and statistics in soil mechanics, unsaturated soil mechanics, rock mechanics and thermo-hydro-mechanical behaviour of soils, dams of loose materials and stability of slopes.

Dr. Núria Pyniol

Lecturer

Núria Pinyol is Lecturer in the Department of Geotechnical Engineering and a postdoc researcher in the International Centre for Numerical Methods in Engineering (CIMNE). She obtained her PhD at UPC in 2010. Her thesis describes the thermo-hydro-mechanical analysis of rapid landslides. It was awarded by UPC as the best thesis in the field of Civil Engineering presented in the period 2009-2010. One of her research interests still focused in the field of landslides. She is currently working modelling landslides using a coupled MPM (Material Point Method) code under development.
Other research topics, in collaboration with colleagues in her Department, include: (a) modelling of the geotechnical behaviour of earth and rockfill dams; (b) advanced constitutive modelling of unsaturated soils including microstructure; (c) constitutive modelling of soft rocks and hard soils including expansive behaviour and degradation.

She is a co-author of two original books published in Springer (“Geomechanics of Failures” and “Geomechanics of Failures. Advanced Topics”) in which some real cases (Vaiont landslide, the sinking of Barcelona Harbour caissons and two tunnel instabilities, among other failures) are described and analyzed in detail. She teaches a course in the UPC Master in Civil Engineering based on these books. She is the author of 12 journal publications and 30 papers in international conferences and workshops. A paper published in Géotechnique (“A review of Beliche dam”) was awarded the Crampton Prize (granted by ICE, UK) in 2006. In 2012 the International Consortium on Landslides selected a paper published in Landslides (“Canelles Landslide: modelling rapid drawdown and fast potential sliding”) as the best paper of 2012. Recently, the Géotechnique paper on “Compacted soil behaviour: initial state, structure and constitutive modelling” received the Geotechnical Research Medal in 2013.
Núria Pinyol also acts as a consultant for private geotechnical companies in projects of underground excavations, earth dams and reinforced walls.

Gaia Di Carluccio

PhD Student

Gaia Di Carluccio graduated with honour in Structural and Geotechnical Engineering at the University of Naples “Federico II” in 2015, with a dissertation on “Piles as heat exchangers in systems with low enthalpy”. In 2016, she started a Ph.D. in Geotechnical Engineering at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia under the supervision of Prof. Eduardo Alonso and Dr. Núria Pinyol. The main topic of her research involves the soil liquefaction modelling with the Material Point Method and the implementation of an advanced constitutive model in the Anura3D code.